Purity and Danger Now

Purity and Danger Now
Author: Robbie Duschinsky
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 443
Release: 2017-01-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1315529718

Mary Douglas’s seminal work Purity and Danger (Routledge, 1966) continues to be indispensable reading for both students and scholars today. Marking the 50th anniversary of Douglas’s classic, the present volume sheds fresh light upon themes raised by Douglas by drawing on recent developments in the social sciences and humanities, as well as current empirical research. In presenting new perspectives on the topic of purity and impurity, the volume integrates work in anthropology and sociology with contemporary ideas from religious studies, cognitive science and the arts. Containing contributions from both established and emerging scholars, including protégées of Douglas herself, Purity and Danger Now is an essential volume for those working on purity and impurity across the full spectrum of the social sciences and humanities.

Purity and Danger

Purity and Danger
Author: Professor Mary Douglas
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2013-06-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1136489274

Purity and Danger is acknowledged as a modern masterpiece of anthropology. It is widely cited in non-anthropological works and gave rise to a body of application, rebuttal and development within anthropology. In 1995 the book was included among the Times Literary Supplement's hundred most influential non-fiction works since WWII. Incorporating the philosophy of religion and science and a generally holistic approach to classification, Douglas demonstrates the relevance of anthropological enquiries to an audience outside her immediate academic circle. She offers an approach to understanding rules of purity by examining what is considered unclean in various cultures. She sheds light on the symbolism of what is considered clean and dirty in relation to order in secular and religious, modern and primitive life.

Mary Douglas

Mary Douglas
Author: Richard Fardon
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2002-01-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134953097

This is the first full length account of the life and ideas of Mary Douglas, the British social anthropologist whose publications span the second half of the twentieth century. Richard Fardon covers Douglas' family background, and the pervasive influence of her catholic faith on her writings before providing an analysis of two of her most influential works; Purity and Danger (1966) and Natural Symbols (1970). The final section deals with Douglas' more controversial writings in the fields of economics, consumption, religion and risk analysis in contemporary societies. Throughout, Fardon highlights the centrality of Douglas' role in the history of anthropology and the discipline's struggle to achieve relevance to contemporary, western societies.

How Institutions Think

How Institutions Think
Author: Mary Douglas
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 164
Release: 1986-06-01
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9780815602064

Do institutions think? If so, how do they do it? Do they have minds of their own? If so, what thoughts occupy these suprapersonal minds? Mary Douglas delves into these questions as she lays the groundwork for a theory of institutions. Usually the human reasoning process is explained with a focus on the individual mind; her focus is on culture. Using the works of Emile Durkheim and Ludwik Fleck as a foundation, How Institutions Think intends to clarify the extent to which thinking itself is dependent upon institutions. Different kinds of institutions allow individuals to think different kinds of thoughts and to respond to different emotions. It is just as difficult to explain how individuals come to share the categories of their thought as to explain how they ever manage to sink their private interests for a common good. Douglas forewarns us that institutions do not think independently, nor do they have purposes, nor can they build themselves. As we construct our institutions, we are squeezing each other's ideas into a common shape in order to prove their legitimacy by sheer numbers. She admonishes us not to take comfort in the thought that primitives may think through institutions, but moderns decide on important issues individually. Our legitimated institutions make major decisions, and these decisions always involve ethical principles.

Risk and Culture

Risk and Culture
Author: Mary Douglas
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 1983-10-27
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0520907396

Can we know the risks we face, now or in the future? No, we cannot; but yes, we must act as if we do. Some dangers are unknown; others are known, but not by us because no one person can know everything. Most people cannot be aware of most dangers at most times. Hence, no one can calculate precisely the total risk to be faced. How, then, do people decide which risks to take and which to ignore? On what basis are certain dangers guarded against and others relegated to secondary status? This book explores how we decide what risks to take and which to ignore, both as individuals and as a culture.

Is Science Racist?

Is Science Racist?
Author: Jonathan Marks
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 72
Release: 2017-02-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0745689256

Every arena of science has its own flash-point issues—chemistry and poison gas, physics and the atom bomb—and genetics has had a troubled history with race. As Jonathan Marks reveals, this dangerous relationship rumbles on to this day, still leaving plenty of leeway for a belief in the basic natural inequality of races. The eugenic science of the early twentieth century and the commodified genomic science of today are unified by the mistaken belief that human races are naturalistic categories. Yet their boundaries are founded neither in biology nor in genetics and, not being a formal scientific concept, race is largely not accessible to the scientist. As Marks argues, race can only be grasped through the humanities: historically, experientially, politically. This wise, witty essay explores the persistence and legacy of scientific racism, which misappropriates the authority of science and undermines it by converting it into a social weapon.

Implicit Meanings

Implicit Meanings
Author: Professor Mary Douglas
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2010-10-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780415606738

Implicit Meanings was first published to great acclaim in 1975. It includes writings on the key themes which are associated with Mary Douglas' work and which have had a major influence on anthropological thought, such as food, pollution, risk, animals and myth. The papers in this text demonstrate the importance of seeking to understand beliefs and practices that are implicit and a priori within what might seem to be alien cultures.

Purity of Blood

Purity of Blood
Author: Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2006-11-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780452287983

Gear up for swashbuckling adventure in the second “riveting”* historical thriller in the internationally acclaimed Captain Alatriste series. The fearless Alatriste is hired to infiltrate a convent and rescue a young girl forced to serve as a powerful priest’s concubine. The girl’s father is barred from legal recourse as the priest threatens to reveal that the man’s family is “not of pure blood” and is, in fact, of Jewish descent—which will all but destroy the family name. As Alatriste struggles to save the young hostage from being burned at the stake, he soon finds himself drawn deeper and deeper into a conspiracy that leads all the way to the heart of the Spanish Inquisition.

Purity and Exile

Purity and Exile
Author: Liisa H. Malkki
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 380
Release: 1995-08-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780226502724

This book explores how categories of identity such as "Hutu" and "Tuts" produced through violence and exile. In 1972 the Burundi army, controlled by t Tutsis, responded to an attempted Hutu rebellion with mass killings of the Hutu The author conducted a year of anthropological field research in Western Tanzani among two groups of Hutu refugees who had fled the killings. One refugee group Kigoma township and the other in the isolated Mishamo refugee camp. The town refugees tended to seek ways of assimilating and inhabiting multiple shifting id contrast to the camp refugees who continually engaged in an impassioned reconstr of their history as a people. Ethnic traits ascribed by social scientists and were freely borrowed to assert cultural difference in this process of identity r In highlighting the different responses to exile in the two refugee groups, this against the assumption that displacement erodes collective identity and shows th possible for refugees in camps to locate their identities within their very disp Mishamo, the refugee camp itself functioned as a spatial and symbolic site for i political and moral community of Hutu.

Biosocial Becomings

Biosocial Becomings
Author: Tim Ingold
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2013-06-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1107434238

All human life unfolds within a matrix of relations, which are at once social and biological. Yet the study of humanity has long been divided between often incompatible 'social' and 'biological' approaches. Reaching beyond the dualisms of nature and society and of biology and culture, this volume proposes a unique and integrated view of anthropology and the life sciences. Featuring contributions from leading anthropologists, it explores human life as a process of 'becoming' rather than 'being', and demonstrates that humanity is neither given in the nature of our species nor acquired through culture but forged in the process of life itself. Combining wide-ranging theoretical argument with in-depth discussion of material from recent or ongoing field research, the chapters demonstrate how contemporary anthropology can move forward in tandem with groundbreaking discoveries in the biological sciences.